Whatev

I could
Write like
This too but in the end

I would
Feel as
If I had wasted your time

I should
Never
Assume that I know it all

But I
Know that
Some forms appeal to me while some lie dead on the page

Hence The Night

Shakespeare, Webster, Thomas Browne
(And even Ford of less renown)
Pursued their wordlets through the town
And onto hillsides, where the crown

Of risen sun beamed majesty
And high delight on Tragedy,
On sighs of productivity;
For love of language, torridly
Enticed, was their proclivity.

But I was never one whose running,
Chasing, scribbling, ink-blot sunning,
Typing, pecking, fretting, punning
Efforts of a low-grade cunning

Turned the faces of the bright
Nouns and verbs within my sight
To notice me, to shine their light
Of warm approval.

Hence the night.

[Wednesday, December 20, 2017]

Gorged Upon Books and Glad to be Full

The one drawback of reading self-critically is that I've now trained myself to read everyone else with the same forensic stare; as a result, I rarely find the same pleasure in stories, essays, poems, and plays that I once did. The issue is not always competence; there are times when a writer is not bad at all, but not for me. At other times, a writer does apparently fail to revise with full attention, and I stumble over the speed-bump clauses.

When I do find work that resonates with me, that offers passion and skill that I can appreciate, then I feel as if I were nine years old again, gorged upon books and glad to be full. For all of the critical comments I've posted here, I hope that I've also offered a sense of my joy in reading, because the joy is real, and it keeps me alive.

Precision For the Sake of Reality --

-- Reality for the sake of fantasy.

"Fiction is an art that calls for the strictest attention to the real -- whether the writer is writing a naturalistic story or a fantasy. I mean that we always begin with what is or with what has an eminent possibility of truth about it. Even when one writes a fantasy, reality is the proper basis of it. A thing is fantastic because it is so real, so real that it is fantastic. Graham Greene has said that he can't write, 'I stood over a bottomless pit,' because that couldn't be true, or 'Running down the stairs I jumped into a taxi,' because that couldn't be true either. But Elizabeth Bowen can write about one of her characters that 'she snatched at her hair as if she heard something in it,' because that is eminently possible."

-- From "Writing Short Stories," in Mystery and Manners, by Flannery O'Connor.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1969.

Standard American Garrulous

My guilty confession, my stammering admission of jackassery: I can't read Carson McCullers.

She writes a simplified Standard American Garrulous without kick or wit, in pages that spell out everything in detail while eschewing the sensory input that would make such a flat prose excusable.

I can read the brittle sermons of Flannery O'Connor, the crazed ravings of Eudora Welty, and even the garden-gone-to-seed Gothic of Truman Capote (who can write surprisingly well when he veers away from passages of Lyricke Poesie), but I recall nothing about Reflections In A Golden Eye beyond my own boredom, and I've just now tossed aside "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" with a sense of shameful relief.

I'm sorry, but I just can't find a doorway into her style.

Rigid Calm

Click for a better jpeg.

M. John Harrison's "The New Rays" became the first story in the first issue of Interzone, and a central part of my favourite collection from the 1980s, The Ice Monkey.

Reading the story again to understand its methods, I found nothing more (and nothing less) than a steadily-built mosaic of impressions, none of which is given more weight than the next. The loss of a clock on a train trip, the appearance of silverfish in a hotel bathroom, a sky the colour of zinc, the boneless blue forms that haunt a cancer-treatment hospital, are observed, and noted, and passed by.

This refusal to prioritize impressions gives the reader a sense of rigid calm in the face of illness and looming death. It also reveals more about the psychology of the narrator, a woman treated less like a patient with dignity and human feelings than like a momentarily useful laboratory animal, than it reveals about the supernatural beings that fumble and drift in the background.

A method like this can only work if the viewpoint character is depressed, detached, or battered by life to the point where the needs of psychological survival outweigh our common human tendency to filter perceptions, to enjoy or dismiss the details that crowd around us every day. In this case, the flat acceptance of everything that happens makes the story stand out all the more like a nightmare.